The Public Option Deception

Obama wants his takeover of health care to be complete. For that he needs the Federal government to be providing health care for most people. That's the "public option." It is the road to single-payer. They say they don't want this takeover - the public option. But they always have wanted it. And they said so repeatedly. Big Government ... More damning still, we uncovered video of the original architect of the public option, Yale professor Jacob Hacker, describing how it was designed to not “frighten people into thinking they are going to lose their private insurance” even though that is the inevitable result. In another clip he denies the plan is a Trojan horse saying, on the contrary, “it’s right there”. In other words, it’s not even a secret. Most relevant of all, Hacker admits in another clip that the real advantage of his plan is that “at least you can make the claim that there is competition between the public and private sectors”. In other words, this is all a marketing strategy designed to get around public resistance to government-run health care. For his part, President Obama has been an extremely disciplined salesman. The mantra of “choice and competition” has been repeated to the point that it is little more than political background noise. To this day, neither the President nor any of his spokespeople have been challenged by the media about these claims, despite the fact that there is video evidence which directly contradicts what he is saying. So confident is the President that the media will toe his line that, in a speech in front of the American Medical Association, the President explicitly denied that the public option was a “Trojan horse” for a single payer system. On this, and numerous other occasions, he has said that opponents of reform who claim this are not telling the truth. Outside talk radio, the conservative blogosphere, and a couple editorials in the Wall Street Journal, no one has been willing to suggest that the opposite is the case. With so many proponents of reform caught on tape directly contradicting the President, it almost seems as if the mainstream media has intentionally avoided covering this story. And as anyone who has been paying attention knows, that’s something they’ve been guilty of more than once since Obama took office. NY Times public editor Clark Hoyt admitted in a bombshell statement that the paper had risked appearing biased for its failure to cover the Van Jones and ACORN stories as they broke. The Washington Post was similarly chastened. And as it turns out, both papers may have an additional reason to avoid touching this story. Because politicians are not the only ones we have exposed admitting the truth about the public option. Back in June, we posted a video of Ezra Klein from the Washington Post revealing how the public option was designed as a “sneaky strategy” to move towards single payer. And we have posted videos of Paul Krugman from the NY Times admitting much the same. ...